Thursday, May 26, 2016

On Barbra, Real Estate and Writing

So, you’re leafing through a
coffee-table book entitled My Passion for
Design by Barbra Streisand and you come across a chapter that deals with
the cellar of her house, a substantial space she has transformed into a mini-mall
of high-end boutiques. You jokingly say to your husband, “I wonder what it
would be like to work in a place like that?” From that comment, made by
playwright Jonathan Tolins, emerged Buyer
and Cellar, a one-character (sort of) play that will open at the Westport
Country Playhouse on June 18, with previews starting June 14. The production is
a reunion of sorts, for Michael Urie, who won numerous awards for originating
the role, will be joined by director Stephen Brackett and many other members of
the original artistic team.

Urie, who plays Marc St. James on
the award-winning TV series Ugly Betty,
will reprise the role of Alex More, an out-of-work actor who catches sight of
an ad for the position of “shopkeeper” in Streisand’s surreal mall. He gets the
job and the rest of the evening entails his learning the ropes while attempting
to establish a relationship with the diva, a woman with whom he is fascinated.

Michael Urie in a previous production of "Buyer and Cellar"

In a recent interview at the
Playhouse, Tolins discussed how the play came about and the many different
strands of meaning and allusions woven into what might appear, on first
viewing, to be a simple send-up of a mega-star and her somewhat odd
proclivities.

Tolins, a Fairfield resident since
2009, was born in Brooklyn, raised in Roslyn, NY, and attended Harvard, where
he was active in theater, both writing, directing and acting, studied
playwriting with professor William Alfred, and co-wrote one of the Hasty
Pudding plays, an annual cross-dressing musical staged by students. His connection
with Alfred is one of those “six-degrees of…” serendipitous relationships, for
Alfred wrote a play called Hogan’s Goat,
which in its long off-Broadway run provided a break-out role for Faye Dunaway
who would, years later, play the role of the mother in Tolins’ The Twilight of the Golds.

Jonathan Tolins. Photo by Joey Stocks

As for the
gestation of Buyer and Cellar, Tolins
said that in 2010 his husband brought Streisand’s book back from the Fairfield library and
they started looking though it.

“We’re
both fascinated by the intersection between celebrity and real estate,” he
said. “So we were looking at this book and on page 190 there’s a chapter that
begins about her basement, which, instead of storage and closet rooms she built
this street of shops – a cobblestone street with a selection of stores.”

Tolins’
reaction to this?

“We
thought it was pretty incredible,” Tolins said, and then he mentioned to his
husband the possibility of someone working down in this subterranean mall, “and
that idea stuck with me, the idea of someone having to be down there, to be the
shopkeeper. So, I wrote a short essay, the diary of someone who got that job,
and I submitted it to The New Yorker.
They rejected it, but I have a good friend named Craig Gartner who manages
Jesse Tyler Ferguson,” referring to the actor best known for his role as
Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom Modern
Family, “and Craig said I should write this as a one-man show for Jesse.
And I thought, well, that’s the kind of thing, five years later, I would say I
should have done.”

But
the idea persisted. Tolins bought a copy of Streisand’s book and read it cover
to cover, making notes on what he found interesting, “bizarre or poignant in
some way,” meshing that with reading a Streisand biography and the many stories
and anecdotes he had heard over the years about Streisand, “because I’m Jewish
and gay,” he said, “and that’s something that just happens.”

The
Jewish/gay intersection might raise an eyebrow or two, if only because the two words,
both often fraught with multiple connotations and at times, and for some, heavy
baggage, requires explication.

“For
Jewish people,” Tolins said, Streisand “is the biggest star that we have. I
guess you could say, well, Jolsen was big, but Streisand is this
unapologetically Jewish persona who became a mega-star, and she showed you
didn’t have to change who you were to succeed in a goyish world. You could
bring that world to its knees.

As
for the gay connection?

“For
gay people,” Tolins said, “it’s similar. She’s indomitable. Through sheer
strength of talent she became the star she wanted to be. The other thing that’s
fun about her, that makes it possible to do a play like this, is that she’s not
self-destructive. So many stars come to a bad end,” he said, “but she is pretty
strong and secure. You know she’s okay, that she’s going to be okay.”

And
yet there’s her basement, a mall, a place where, normally, multitudes gather to
shop, converse and mingle that apparently she has converted into a shrine to
consumerism focused on the individual, the sole shopper who covets for purchase
what she already owns. It is this contradiction that gives Tolins’ play a
greater weight, the whisper of existential loneliness beneath the humor, a
loneliness that embraces both the play’s narrator and his subject.

The mall

“What’s
interesting about what the play explores,” Tolins said, “is how that kind of
incredible celebrity can lead a person to be somewhat out of touch.” He paused,
and then shifted gears. “I started to think about my own life in Los Angeles as
a temp, an actor, and all the people I know who are called…who are
underemployed…and the odd jobs they have, and I imagined this guy, Alex Moore,
who ended up in this job and would be the kind of person Barbra might have a
real friendship with.”

Alex
gets the job, but it is Tolins who envisioned what it might be like to be the
caretaker of the cathedral to consumerism. Anyone who has ever written a scene
for a film, a play, a novel or a short story knows that, as you are writing it,
you can’t help but be subsumed into what you are creating.

“I
always say there was one magical moment in the writing process,” Tolins said,
“when I got to the point when I was so deeply into it that I actually felt it
was happening to me. Certain moments when, like, when [Streisand] takes Alex’s
hand and he describes how it feels, and rubbing her nails, her famous nails. Or
there’s a line where, at the end of the play – ‘She took me by the hand and led
me out through…into the cruel Malibu air,’ or something, and I thought, she
makes this trip (down into the ‘mall’) to see me every day, and when that line
‘happened,’ – when you’re writing you’re not really writing, you’re just
letting it happen, and I felt, ‘Wow,’ I’m really in this, I’m really feeling
like he is.”

And
then there are these lines, also occurring near the end of the play:

ALEX: She smiled and walked over to the
couch and sat down next to me. Close. Uncomfortably close.

BARBRA: This is nice, “hanging out” with
you. People don’t come by and visit me too often. Nobody “pops by.” I spend a lot
of time alone.

Tolins wrote about and, as a writer,
traveled to a different world, a world most of us can only imagine, a
“somewhere over the rainbow” world that turns out, in the end, to be neither Oz
nor “home,” a world where ruby slippers are just another pair of shoes you
purchase and put on display.

“There’s
a sadness in the play,” Tolins said. “People are usually surprised by it, but
they end up feeling more than they expected to feel. I think it’s because you
genuinely feel these two people come together and then you sense their
inability to maintain a relationship because of their distance in where they
are in their lives, economically, and where they are in show business.”

Tolins
raised his hands as if to say, “Wait a minute,” perhaps reconsidering what he
had just said.

“I
think we live in a time…and it’s something Chris Hayes writes about in his
book, Twilight of the Elites…that we
live in a time of ‘fractal inequality,’ where no matter where you are in the
society you feel less than someone else. At the core of the play is this
feeling that no matter how high you get on the mountaintop, it’s not enough,
and something in ourselves, and something in our society, makes us feel like
we’re never ‘there,’ or if we get there – who’s more successful than Barbra
Streisand? – it’s not enough to make one happy all day long.”

Staying
with the idea of the sadness that lurks in the wings of the play, Tolins added:
“One of the key lines in the play, where some of that sadness comes from, is
when she explains why she was with Jon Peters for so long,” referring to the
hair stylist turned movie producer. “She says, ‘He knew what to do on Sundays.’
That’s a line I actually read in an interview Barbra did in the 70s. We all can
relate to that, especially if you have kids. It’s a long day to fill. So, even
the most successful entertainer on the planet still has a fear of how to fill
the time on Sunday.”

As
a writer, Tolins “imagined,” with the help of a lot of research, many of the
incidents in the play, but the imagining has proven to be eerily accurate. Many
people who know Streisand, who have visited “the basement” and have seen the
play, have said to Tolins: “How did you know?” However, the question arises, do
you have to be a Streisand aficionado to enjoy the play? Tolins suggests not:
“Don’t worry,” he said, “you will enjoy this play, but if you are a Streisand fan there are Easter
eggs all through it,” meaning little delights, Streisand tidbits, if you will,
hidden in the text waiting to be found and savored. “It’s kind of like my
Barbra ‘Wasteland,’” he explained, alluding to the T. S. Eliot poem. “The
allusions are legion.”

Tolins
noted that at the beginning of the play there’s a caveat, that the play is “all
fiction.” That, of course, allowed him poetic license, so he didn’t dwell on
“reality” per se, for, as he freely admits, the premise is “ridiculous,” so he
focused on “whatever conjecture and empathy I had for this character. Barbra to
me is this fun mix of a superstar and a woman who shops at Loehmann’s.”

But,
again, this empathy can’t help but cycle back to what it is like to be born
with one or perhaps two societal strikes against you, and to succeed yet, at
the same time, carry with you certain moments that are etched into your soul.

Making
reference to Orson Welles film Citizen
Kane and the psychological centrality of the sled, the “Rosebud” of the
character’s childhood, prompted Tolins to say: “In the context of the play it’s
that hot water doll, the doll she didn’t get. That’s a true story, the hot
water doll is something that comes from her own interviews. There’s also the
famous line that her step-father told her she was too ugly to have ice cream.”

Too
ugly to have ice cream.

It
puts a different spin on Streisand’s signature song, “People.” We're children, needing other children / And
yet letting a grown-up pride / Hide all the need inside / Acting more like
children than children.

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